Conscience and Its Critics: Protestant Conscience, Enlightenment Reason, and Modern Subjectivity by Edward G. Andrew (review)

324 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Edward G. Andrew. Conscience and Its Critics: Protestant Conscience, Enlightenment Reason, and Modern Subjectivity University of Toronto Press. xii, 260. $45.00 Postmodernity has encouraged the making of books on the making of modernity. Edward G. Andrew offers a genealogy of modern morals, whose keywords are individual rights, values, and choices. He traces that subjectivity to >tensions between Protestant conscience and Enlightenment reason, not a harmonious conjunction of the two.= Those are, he knows, >ideal types= (or >archetypes=) that will be arguable because of their variousness. But he aspires >not [to] do much violence to the complexity and variety of intellectual history.= For the purposes of his genealogy, reason means the strand in the thought of >the Enlightenment= (or >the Enlightenment project=) emphasizing public opinion rather than individual judgment, and Protestant >[c]onscience emphasizes not that judgment be rational, but that it be one=s own.= Because we are one in our capacity for moral choice and disparate in our ability to calculate, conscience privileges human equality and reason privileges inequality. Andrew sketches this family tree in nine short chapters. He begins with a schematic of the history of the Protestant conscience from Luther to the Levellers, which concludes with the triumph of individual judgment over the defences erected by the magisterial reformers against >radical subjectivism and antinomianism.= That is perhaps a synecdoche that reduces all of Protestantism to a strand in radical Nonconformity. Outside of that English Protestant niche, the eighteenth-century Protestant conscience seems vastly less subjective. In Scotland, the Kirk that first repressed David Hume and later repelled him tolerated little enthusiasm and less experimentation. On the continent, which Andrew chooses mostly to bracket, Kant=s categorical imperative may be read as an effort to rationalize the universalistic ethic of obligation that he learned in his Pietist boyhood. In the second chapter, Andrew proposes to >associate conscience as intellectual reflection with Michel de Montaigne [as reflected in Hamlet, although >(i)t is unclear whether Shakespeare read Montaigne=] and conscience as moral-religious scruples with Martin Luther.= The point seems to be to differentiate >Catholic and Enlightenment thinkers,= who usually identify prudence and conscience, from >Protestant and romantic thinkers,= who usually separate them. Pertinent here may be the first adjective in Andrew=s aspiration >not [to] do much violence to the complexity and variety of intellectual history.= After an analysis of John Milton=s innerdirected notion of free conscience, Andrew successively considers Thomas Hobbes=s effort >to tame= the fissiparous Nonconformist conscience and John Locke=s case for vesting >the right of subjective certainty in the revolutionary=s conscience.= The chapter on Hobbes is an impressive exercise in close reading. There follows an account of Bishops Berkeley and humanities 325 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Butler contra Bernard Mandeville and the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Next, in discussing a few of the usual suspects from the Scottish Enlightenment, Andrew makes the telling point that >[f]or leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, freedom of conscience was Hobbesian Erastianism.= Reference to the first volume of Isabel Rivers=s magisterial Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study in the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660B1780 (1991) would have enriched Andrew=s analysis of British ethical thought during that period. Andrew in his penultimate chapter looks at conscience in >the radical politics of Paine, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Blake.= Blake is the cynosure: >England may not have had an Enlightenment but she had its greatest critic.= Andrew=s historical judgment about England rests on an apparent misinterpretation of the work of J.G.A. Pocock and the late Roy Porter. They reject efforts to construct a unitary notion of the Enlightenment (or >the Enlightenment project=) from the mid-eighteenth-century radical French experience, but they both maintain that England had an Enlightenment, on Pocock=s showing likely several enlightenments. Porter lived to tell the tale in Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000). After a chapter persuasively arguing for >the implicitly Protestant character of [John Stuart] Mill=s doctrine of conscience and its rights to freedom,= Andrew...